There’s not even a big tea culture overall. About the only non alcoholic beverage that has what could be called a culture, where there’s a social aspect with a depth that extends beyond just drinking something is coffee, and even that isn’t the kind of thing you’d find in other places.
It does exist mind you, but it’s pretty exclusively a family centric thing in what little I’ve seen.
Like, we do have tea houses, and we have places where green tea making and drinking is based on a kind of pan-asian motif, or japanese tea houses. But for the most part, if you want something that isn’t commoditized, you’d look good families that have their own culture built up over generations, and that’s still extremely rare from what I’ve run into.
I know exactly one family that has a green tea culture, and only two that have a more general tea culture.
This isn’t to say people don’t drink green tea. Plenty do, including myself (both cold and hot). But it’s about like making koolaid to most people. It’s just making something to drink, with no other meaning or import. Now, I kinda got into the more ritual side of green tea briefly, back when I was still able to do the whole martial arts thing, and that’s one place you do sometimes find green tea culture here, but it’s almost always with Japanese marital arts. But I never really internalized that, it was more of a curiosity and experience thing than something I was dedicated to doing.
Like others have said, pretty much non existent.
There’s not even a big tea culture overall. About the only non alcoholic beverage that has what could be called a culture, where there’s a social aspect with a depth that extends beyond just drinking something is coffee, and even that isn’t the kind of thing you’d find in other places.
It does exist mind you, but it’s pretty exclusively a family centric thing in what little I’ve seen.
Like, we do have tea houses, and we have places where green tea making and drinking is based on a kind of pan-asian motif, or japanese tea houses. But for the most part, if you want something that isn’t commoditized, you’d look good families that have their own culture built up over generations, and that’s still extremely rare from what I’ve run into.
I know exactly one family that has a green tea culture, and only two that have a more general tea culture.
This isn’t to say people don’t drink green tea. Plenty do, including myself (both cold and hot). But it’s about like making koolaid to most people. It’s just making something to drink, with no other meaning or import. Now, I kinda got into the more ritual side of green tea briefly, back when I was still able to do the whole martial arts thing, and that’s one place you do sometimes find green tea culture here, but it’s almost always with Japanese marital arts. But I never really internalized that, it was more of a curiosity and experience thing than something I was dedicated to doing.